Commentaries and critiques on the visual and performing arts in the greater Canton, Ohio area

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Remembering The Way, The Truth, and The Life

Remembering The Way, The Truth, and The Life

To my readers, He
is risen indeed. It’s Spring. May the following words be as seeds, and may you
harvest the Life that they promise. A Blessed Easter to you all.

Jesus said to her, "I am
the resurrection and the life. He whobelieves
in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will
never die. Do you believe this?-
John 11:25,26

Praise be to the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth
into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and
into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for
you,…1Peter
1: 3,4

For God so loved the world
that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not
perish but have eternal life.

- John 3:16

And
if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who
raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through
his Spirit, who lives in you.–
Romans 8:11

I
have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you
will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”- John 16:33

“The Resurrection narratives are not a
picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being
has arisen in the universe. Something new has appeared in the universe: as new
as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get
divided into “ghost” and “corpse.” A new mode of being has arisen. That is the
story. What are we going to make of it?”- C.S. Lewis, from What are we to Make of Jesus Christ?

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying
the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept
Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is
the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of
things Jesus said would not be a great moralteacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says
he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your
choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or
something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill
him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let
us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human
teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

― C.S. Lewis, from Mere
Christianity

These last three
paragraphs are from The Everlasting Man, by
G.K.Chesterton:

“They took the body down from the cross and
one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury
it in a rock tomb in his garden; the Romans setting a military guard lest there
should be some riot and attempt to recover the body. There was once more a
natural symbolism in these natural proceedings; it was well that the tomb
should be sealed with all the secrecy of ancient eastern sepulture [burial] and
guarded by the authority of the Caesars.

For in that second cavern the whole of that
great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered
over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing
called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and
the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In
the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they
could only die; and they were dead.

On the third day the friends of Christ
coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled
away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly
realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was
the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a
semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of
the evening but the dawn.”

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About Me

Visual artist, journalist and teacher Tom Wachunas received his BFA (1973) and MFA (1975) degrees from The Ohio State University. From 1977 through 1991 he resided in New York City, where he painted and exhibited extensively and curated shows for “alternative” galleries. During much of that time he was the assistant artistic director of the Diane Jacobowitz Dance Theatre, designing sets and composing sound scores. He has been an accomplished arts journalist since 1986, writing hundreds of reviews and features on the visual and performing arts for numerous regional and international publications. Locally, since 2001, he has had one-man shows at Millworks Gallery (Akron), the Canton Museum of Art, Kent State University Stark, Malone University, and Second April Galerie in downtown Canton. He is a regular exhibitor in many area group shows. Currently he is the curator for Gallery 6000 on the Kent Stark campus, where he is also an adjunct instructor teaching Art as a World Phenomenon.